Episode 807: Why AI Gets Worse Over Time (And How to Fix It) With Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

EBT807 – Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju

[00:00:00]  Megan Porta 

If you are still using AI as a glorified search engine or prompt generator, this episode is going to completely expand your thinking. Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju of Urban Farmiejoins me to share what AI actually looks like inside a modern full time food blogging business. We go far beyond prompting and into systems, workflows and one surprisingly simple habit that helps keep AI aligned with your voice while avoiding common pitfalls such such as hallucinations and generic output.
  

We also talk about where AI truly shines, where it falls short, and why. Shruthi believes AI is not optional anymore. It is becoming a core part of how creators operate. This conversation opened my eyes in a big way.

[00:00:57]  Intro 

Hi food bloggers, I’m Megan Porta and this is Eat Blog Talk, your space for support, inspiration and strategies to grow your blog and your freedom. Whether that’s purchased, personal, professional or financial, you are not alone on this journey. 

[00:01:10]  Megan Porta

Shruthi, it is so good to see you. How are you today?

[00:01:02]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I am good, Megan, how are you?

[00:01:04]  Megan Porta 

Yay. I’m good too. Enjoying summer. It’s finally here in Minnesota.

[00:01:10]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Don’t know. Not here in Seattle. It is currently 56 degree and I don’t know how it is almost the middle of June and I’m wearing a sweater.

[00:01:23]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I mean our winter lasted a long time so I feel the pain. But now we’re in full fledged summer here. Well, yes, I’m excited to chat with you. I think this is a super relevant and helpful topic for food bloggers. Right now we’re going to talk about AI and kind of prompting past the basics and, and some kind of issues you noticed and how you’ve dealt with those.
 

But first we want to know who you are. Who are, who’s Shruthi, tell us about you and your blog. A little bit.

[00:01:56]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah, so I run Urban Framie which is, I like to think of it as like a global vegetarian recipes hub. The backstory is that I actually work in the food and agriculture space professionally as well and had worked full time until last Friday when I actually left my, you know, 15 year career to pursue this blog.

[00:02:24]  Megan Porta 

Congratulations. That’s huge.

[00:02:27]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Thank you. I am, I am very excited to take this on full time as well. But in that life I have traveled and worked in over 65 countries. I used to work for the United Nations. I, you know, advise in a lot of like agriculture and food spaces. Would come across all of these different recipes and I have this notebook that I keep with me where I was like, always keeping track of new recipes that I learned in all of these travels.

[00:02:53]   

And then when the pandemic hit, I thought, oh, wow, like, I should actually, like, share these recipes somewhere because I stopped hosting dinner parties. And that was kind of the genesis of the blog. And I’ve been growing it since 2020 and it is now my full time income. And so that’s the blog and the business.

[00:03:12]   

I have a toddler, my husband works in tech, and both of us are engineers. So obviously we are constantly tinkering with all of the edge cases of AI. And I think my AI setup is honestly the only reason all of my different parts of life actually coexist. So I’m kind of excited to share what I’ve learned from that here.

[00:03:32]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, and I wanted to mention you came to one of our first retreats, Eat Blog Talk retreats, and we had so, so much fun at that retreat. I still, it’s. It goes down in history as one of the most fun retreats of all time. So thank you for contributing to that.

[00:03:48]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I had a blast. I think I made some blogging besties from that retreat.

[00:03:52]  Megan Porta 

I know. And the conga line, I mean, we can’t forget that moment.

[00:03:57]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Oh, my goodness, yes.

[00:03:59]  Megan Porta 

Seared in my brain forever. Good times. Good times. Oh, such good times. Okay, so you’re into AI. What areas of your blogging business do you use it, I guess, the most? And do you use it on like, you use it past the basics? So it’s more like what you said, like not just prompts, but beyond prompts.

[00:04:23]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Correct. Yeah. So you can kind of think of like a three step ladder when it comes to using AI, I think most people and it roughly correlates with what I tend to think of as the surfaces of AI. So I’m going to use Claude as an example because that is probably the tool that I use the most.

[00:04:40]   

But it’s pretty similar. Even if you use ChatGPT or Gemini with Claude, you kind of have what is called at the top left. If you have the desktop app installed, it’ll have three little buttons. So the first one is just chat, which is what most people are familiar with, and it’s a conversation.

[00:04:56]   

It’s like texting your best friend who happens to be a blogging bestie and an expert in all the other things in the world, and it’s able to kind of riff with you. There’s a second step to it, which is Cowork, which you can kind of think of as your blogging bestie sitting next to you.

[00:05:11]   

And having access to your laptop because it can actually make changes on your. And I know that sounds scary. You can have permission set so it doesn’t accidentally delete things, but it can make changes on your laptop. It can pull information, it can write information, which means, you know, you can connect it to your Google search console and your Semrush and your Airtable and your Gmail.

[00:05:32]   

So it really kind of becomes like a unifying dashboard of sorts that brings all of your pieces together, which previously just lived in your brain. And then there’s Claude Code, which I think, honestly, Cowork is so good these days. It gets you 95% of the way there. You can go into Claude Code if you’re more of like an engineering coding personality and you want to debug and test things and so on.

[00:05:57]   

But for 95% of people, code is kind of. You can do it if it’s fun, but it’s not necessary. And so when I think of my AI setup, I’m primarily working in Cowork and code and using chat when I’m on the go, because Cowork doesn’t work as well on the phone. So it’s more like if I need a quick summary of something or if I just need whatever, I use chat.

[00:06:22]   

But I actually mostly work in coworkers.

[00:06:24]  Megan Porta 

Okay. And is there a comparable situation on ChatGPT in Gemini?

[00:06:30]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

It would be Codex, I think, is the Cowork equivalent. So Codex is. I think the big distinction is that Cowork or Codex is capable of thinking and doing versus chat is much more responding. It’s basically just taking stuff and, like, giving you answers. So it can’t actually do anything.

[00:06:50]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Okay. So recently you kind of came across a hiccup with AI where people were stumbling a little bit. Do you want to talk through that?

[00:07:01]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah. So AI has been a topic of conversation in all of our circles for such a long time now. And I think most of my friends know that I, you know, a little bit of a mad scientist. I tend to like tinker, etc. And I was having this conversation with them because I’ve been using AI extension extensively.

[00:07:16]   

I have various projects set up, and one of the projects is really for Instagram and social media, just because, you know, you have to trial with so many different hooks and ideas and concepts. And what I realized was that there was a point in time a couple months ago where it was really starting to degrade, you know, and a lot of us have probably experienced this where you’re like, the first time you open up to like a new LLM and it’s like the best thing since sliced bread.

[00:07:43]   

It’s just like, whoa, like it’s giving me all of this content that’s so amazing. And then a month later you’re like, no, this is not what I asked you. Like, you were doing so much better before.

[00:07:53]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. What is going on?

[00:07:56]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah, it’s like, why did you get so dumb? And the thing is, it’s not so much that the model has deteriorated or that it’s gotten dumb. What usually happens is that you start with a blank slate so it’s clean, there’s no baggage. So the model is giving you really fresh attentive output. Then over months, what you need to realize is that the memory of any of these AI tools is actually committing a bunch of things that you have said into its memory.

[00:08:27]   

You’ve added instructions, you’ve created custom rules, you’ve thrown some files at it, you have saved conversations. What happens is that without you realizing it, some of these things are going to contradict each other. Think about the analogy that I was giving a friend the other day is like, it’s like your spice cabinet.

[00:08:47]   

One day you’re like, I’m gonna clean all of this crap out. You sit down, you pull everything, you toss the expired stuff. But then, you know, over time, the next six months, you realize you bought like a bottle of whatever, marjoram and it’s sitting in the back and like, you’ve never used it again.Who uses. I don’t even know.

[00:09:04]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I’ve never used marjoram.

[00:09:06]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I. I have one. I’m like, what? You have like three half empty bottles of cumin because you keep forgetting it and you keep going to the grocery store and picking something up. Your AI setup is the same thing. It just becomes a junk drawer. Right. And at that point, if you start writing prompts and saying, be more conversational, sound warmer. It’s going to help a little, but it’s just like adding more cumin to a cluttered cabinet.

[00:09:33]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, well, that’s such a great analogy. I think we just actually went through our spice cupboard. We had our kitchen cupboards redone and cream of tartar, we had like four. Four contain four large containers of cream of tartar. And I was like, why? Yeah, so I. That like puts the perfect visual in my head.

[00:09:51]   

So how do we clean it up? Is there one prompt to kind of clean the slate again every time? And how often do we have to do that?

[00:09:59]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

So I think actually it’s a two part process and my biggest lesson in being kind of an AI power user over the last even year is that I actually learned a lot more about my own writing from teaching the machine to write like me.

[00:10:16]  Megan Porta 

Okay, interesting.

[00:10:19]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Because, like, you know, when you first get AI to sound like you kind of, you describe your voice in a way that you think describes you. So you might say something like, I am warm and conversational. I’m very practical. But the thing is, that could be the same for you and it could be the same for me.

The same way at all. Right. And so what ends up happening is that I started doing this stuff, whether it was for writing, you know, short emails to send out, or it was for Instagram hooks or whatever. And it would write something and I’d read it and be like, this is kind of there, but this is not really me.

[00:10:55]   

Like, for instance, I hate the rule of three. And that’s a rhetorical pattern that I love. So it’ll just be like flavorful and unforgettable.

[00:11:03]  Megan Porta 

Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh, I hate it.

[00:11:06]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I hate it. I am British educated and so we use a lot of EM dashes and Oxford commas. But then when you see it in AI, I actually had to, like, as much as it pained me, I had to create a rule to be like, nope, this is not gonna work. And you have to be like, you start getting more specific.

[00:11:22]   

But then that’s why it also corrodes over time, because if you got specific in one place. And I think before we started recording, I was sharing this example. So Instagram hooks keep changing, right? Last month, a question based hook was working best for me. So I was literally telling it, hey, like, question based hooks are working better.

[00:11:41]   

So, like, give me more question based hooks for X, Y and Z reels. And then, you know, sometime in the last, like two weeks or so, that has not been the case anymore. And more authority type hooks are working. So if I say, like, I learned this from a chef in Sicily, or, you know, my Indian grandmother taught me this recipe that has been working better.

[00:12:02]   

But now what’s going to happen is that AI does not overwrite rules. It always adds. So if you think of all the instructions you’ve given AI as one document, and it literally in most cases is a single reference document, it’s going to have question hooks work best for Shruthi at the top, and then like 10 lines later, it’s going to say, authority hooks work the best for Shruthi at the bottom.

[00:12:26]   

And so the next time you’re prompting it the way that the generation process works is that it’s going to read through the whole reference list. So now it’s thinking, questions work best, authority works best. Oh, both of these are contradicting each other. So now it’s going to give you something that’s a mashup of the two, or it’s just going to average it, it’s going to pick one and it starts behaving in unpredictable ways.

[00:12:49]   

And so what I do every month is one, I think within Claude, I work specifically in projects. Actually, this concept of one master project to rule them all is probably what is causing the bloat. Because the way I write in my email is not how I show up on Instagram. My email audience is significantly older.

[00:13:11]   

It’s a different demographic. And who I am in my email voice is quite different than what I do on social media because the attention span is so much smaller. And so I have a social media project that has instructions specific to social media and so on. So I have a couple of different of these projects.

[00:13:29]   

And every month I spend one hour just going through the instruction file. So in Claude, if you’re working in Cowork, this is called Claude.md. So every project will have a Claude.md file. If you’re in chat within. Sorry, within Claude, if you’re working in the chat interface, it’ll just be the project instructions on the top right corner.

[00:13:50]   

And it’s the same thing for ChatGPT too. If you are within a project, it’ll have project instructions that you have put in. I just go look at it every single month and I see and you know, it should be short and sweet. More is not always better because just think about it, every single time you are asking a question in that project, the AI is going to go through everything in that document.So you have to ask yourself, are, is all of this relevant for what I’m trying to do?

[00:14:20]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Wow. Okay. I. Yeah. And if it’s not, then just, you can just delete it.

[00:14:28]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah. And I think that’ll make it much more tuned and kind of like, you know, dialed in to what you’re looking for. And that is why having separate projects is also important.

[00:14:38]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Okay. That’s kind of mind blowing, but it makes sense. So we’re basically confusing AI. We’re giving it multiple prompts and it’s like, well, what do I do with all of this information now? It’s not smart enough to say that though, right? Like it couldn’t come back at you and say, wait, you told me in April this and now you’re telling me this. Instead, it just figures something out and decides on its own what to provide.

[00:15:09]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah, exactly. As a result, your answers are going to be garbage. That’s why people get frustrated, because it’s like. And it’s never the first couple instances you’re using something the first times. It’s always like whoa. Anytime they release a new model, it’s like, oh, this is working really well. And then it slowly starts to accumulate craft.It’s exactly like the spice drawer. That analogy. If you keep in mind, you will clean out your spice drawer every month.

[00:15:39]  Megan Porta 

I love it. 

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[00:15:39]  Megan Porta

So I’m having a hard time finding it. I feel like it used to be really obvious where the project inspects instructions were in ChatGPT in ChatGPT.

[00:17:30]   

It’s just not like it’s not obvious to me where I feel like it. Like, I used to be able to upload a document and that disappeared. Document. I don’t know. It was really easy before and now I just can’t find. Like, I can go to Share Project, rename Project, delete Project, but I really don’t know where to find.Maybe it’s edit. Okay.

[00:17:57]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

No, you’re right. Actually, I’m just looking at this and it is…

[00:18:05]  Megan Porta 

It’s not super obvious.

[00:18:07]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

The files are easy because you can actually like, just. If you hit the top three right button, there’s like a Files in Chat section in there. So that should show up. It has been so long since I’ve used ChatGPT projects that I am…

[00:18:24]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, can. I’ll figure that out. But can you talk about, like, ChatGPT versus Claude? Because I’ve heard lately that food bloggers are moving mostly to Claude. It’s just, quote, better in so many ways. Do you feel that?

[00:18:39]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I think it’s closer than people think. And the gap always keeps closing. Right. It’s not like one is not being updated and the other is like the, like, biggest, you know it’s the next best thing. I choose Claude because I personally really like the company and I, you know, I like Anthropic as a company. And I think the only other big difference that I would say is that it has a longer context window, which means that it actually, in some ways, maybe that’s detrimental because it does tend to remember things longer.

[00:19:13]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:19:13]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah. The rules that I was describing, you know, kind of like, how do you. Your voice, rules, et cetera. I think work on any tool. I don’t think you. You can pick one that you feel more comfortable with and get it to really work for you, because then you can work on any of the other tools.

[00:19:32]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So going in and just tweaking projects, you think on a monthly basis is a good timeframe.

[00:19:40]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I do it on a monthly basis just because I, you know, I. It’s truly like the second employee in my business. You know, it has and so if you think about feedback to your employees, Right. Like, you wouldn’t just go a year without giving them any feedback. And this is your version of giving feedback to your robot employee to do better work for you.

[00:20:04]  Megan Porta 

Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. That’s such a good way to think about it. Is there anything else that you can think of? Since you’re such an AI guru and you’re a blogger, what else can help us with AI in our businesses? Any other little tips or tidbits you have for us?

[00:20:21]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I, you know, one of the things that I have been thinking about a lot is that you should really think before you start using AI for anything. Think about what you will not use AI for. The things that AI is really good are repeatable tasks. Right? It is really good as a thought partner in the sense of like it is good at giving you inputs.

[00:20:44]   

At best it can be a board of advisors, but it cannot be the CEO. So you know, I often hear conversations where people are like, well, you know, I just like gave it all of this Google search console information and then it told me what to do and it’s like, it’s gonna sound super confident and it’s going to tell you what to do.

[00:21:04]   

Doesn’t always mean that it is. Right, right. AI can tell me, hey, like Shruthi, there’s like, you know, the search volume. You are working on a Thai cluster right now and here are 10 recipes that have tremendous search volume. But it’s not going to be able to tell me that like oh, actually I’m not interested in doing as many Thai desserts because I’m not a dessert blogger.

[00:21:27]   

Right. Like maybe it can at that level of like macro, but it’s not going to tell you. Hey, like actually like when I say that I want to work on Indian cuisine, I want to work on these specific sub regional cuisines and here’s why. Because I lived in X, Y and Z places and you know what I mean it’s, and you, and you can give it all of that context but it is actually that’s not what AI is for.

[00:21:47]   

I think anything that has a consistent shape, that doesn’t require lived experience is where I go to AI for so email, subjects, alt text, any kind of structured metadata, reviews. Yes, absolutely. Like you can, let’s say I was, I was working on a digital product funnel recently and I told Claude, adopt five different hats, expert hats and tell me what you would change on this.

[00:22:12]   

For example, you can be an email expert, you can be a digital marketing expert, you can be a social media viral strategist. How would you restructure any of these things? And it gave some really good ideas, but not all of them were good. And so that strategic layer recipe development, you can use it absolutely for recipe standardization.

[00:22:36]   

So you can use it to run a check to say, hey, like make sure, you know, on my blog, for instance, I do not use partial anything. So if I’m using coconut milk, it needs to be a can of coconut milk. It cannot be half a can, you know, and sometimes, you know, stuff gets away from you.

[00:22:51]   

Any something like that, which is like very clear and discreet, is easy. But, you know, sometimes it’ll be like, I’ll just say medium onion and it’s like, what is a medium onion? You know, and so I have standardization rules built in, so it runs a check at the very end. Once everything is finalized, it’ll tell me, hey, like you, you know, this is beating your own rule of something.

[00:23:13]   

So that is great. But it can generate a recipe for you because what it’s going to do is it’s going to scrape the Internet and it’s just going to like, average again. It’s the same thing as the prompts, right? It’s going to average the last like six things and it’s going to scoot something out that’s not great.

[00:23:28]   

And so I think the voice and in today’s world, especially with AI overviews, really kind of taking over so much of like everything. Honestly, I think I would be very cautious about what your AI can like, you know, synthesize your experience. AI can standardize your experience. AI cannot have lived experience.

[00:23:57]   

So the more. Actually, the biggest lesson for me has been that it’s been a mirror. It has been really good at telling me what my voice is, you know, how do I write? What if I read something on paper, can I immediately tell I wrote this? And everybody has tells, you know, and maybe, you know, I used to use y’ all a lot because I used to live in Texas.

[00:24:21]   

Blend into every, like, even professional emails, you know, you just like. And I was reading an old post that I wrote in 2020, I was like, this is definitely me.

[00:24:30]  Megan Porta 

Yeah.

[00:24:33]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

like that, you know, lean into that. Because that is what is going to make the difference with your audience, especially for them to know, hey, like, this is Shruthi. Here’s how she talks and here’s how she frames a recipe or here’s how she’s going to show up on screen.

[00:24:48]  Megan Porta 

Are there any ways you’ve used AI for your business or your personal life that have really, like, changed things? Like maybe gotten rid of something you were outsourcing or just been a life changer in some other way?

[00:25:03]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Honestly, I think as I was saying, like, I was in a full time, a very high stress, full time job until Friday. And I mean, my company was a $14 billion company and I was a partner there. And so, yeah, wow. The only way that I had made the blog work, you know, was because I had the support of AI so it is impossible to balance.

[00:25:28]   

I think AI actually creates space for us to do a lot of these things. And so there’s no version of this life where I can work 80 hour weeks, like, in order to do all of the things that I want to do. And often what happens in that case is that you lose the things that you really want to do and instead you are forced to do the things you have to do.

[00:25:48]   

You know what I mean? I didn’t want to leave consulting to build another consulting shaped life, just with different stuff in it. And so I think AI for me is very structural. It is not a productivity hack. It’s not a nice to have. I think it is actually the linchpin that holds all the different pieces together.

[00:26:09]   

And what AI has, you know, something always has to give in our lives, especially as, like, you know, if you’re a mom, if you’re a business owner, you have so many hats you’re wearing. And thankfully having AI means that the thing that gives is the overhead, not stuff that I actually care about and not the business and not the family.

[00:26:31]  Megan Porta 

Yeah. Yeah, that was very well said. Yep. Well, what else do we need to know? What else would be helpful for food bloggers who maybe just use AI on a prompt basis or want to learn a little bit more about it?

[00:26:47]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I would say really nail down your voice. You know, think about, like, if you were to like, blindfold a friend and give them a post from your site versus a post from another site that does similar recipes to yours, can they recognize this is you? Right. And so I would say audit, like, go back, find five of your best posts.

[00:27:15]   

It can either be the post that, like, your audience resonated the most with. It can be the best performing post, maybe a mix of all of it, and go through and really, like, examine it like you’re a teacher that is proctoring an exam. Right? Like, what about this makes that post you. Is it depth over breadth?

[00:27:34]   

Like, you know, what, what is it? Like, what is specific to your authority in the sense of like, you know, and I like, I did a lot of like, brand positioning work. I think Katie was on your podcast recently too, right? Katie Tran, brand, like, she is amazing at branding and she like, you know, walked us through a brand positioning exercise at one point.

[00:27:57]   

And she’s a good friend. And as I was thinking through it, I realized I am never going to be the most authoritative person on 60 cuisines. That’s not going to happen. Somebody that is Ethiopian is going to have more lived experience from that perspective. But I think my unique voice is that I keep recipes in the kind of the form that they are in.

[00:28:21]   

So somebody that is Ethiopian will taste it and recognize that it is authentic, but you can make it at home in an American kitchen on a Tuesday. So I’m like, hey, if you don’t have tamarind paste, here’s how you can substitute that with lime and brown sugar in the exact proportions you use.

[00:28:35]   

So it’s kind of half engineer, mad scientist, half traveled experience maintaining some level of authenticity, but without asking you to buy 15 spices. So that is my brand and that is my voice. And I knew that vaguely. But I think doing this process of identifying the posts and really going through and line by line and saying, here’s an example of a sentence that I am proud of.

[00:29:02]   

Here’s how I really write. Here’s something that I demonstrated in a post that I think is super clearly explained, or a paragraph that somebody wrote you about and said, hey, this was actually a complicated step, but the way you wrote it, I really got it. Find those spots, because that’s you. That’s what AI is not going to replace.

[00:29:25]   

And really use that to continue to build your prompts and your instructions over time. So then it will truly be a mirror of who you are, because that’s what AI needs to be a mirror. It is not going to replace who you are, as much as all the overlords in the world are trying to.

[00:29:46]  Megan Porta 

Right.

[00:29:46]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

That is what they cannot take away from you.

[00:29:48]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I love that. And I feel like it’s allowing us to know. Get to know ourselves better. And for me, lately, it’s been allowing me to get to know my brand better. Like, there are things. I just had an AEO audit done, and I’m kind of moving through that. Without AI, I feel like I would be lost.

[00:30:06]   

I would be like, I don’t know how to make this change, and I don’t really know what this means, but AI has helped me move through the points in the audit and really understand who I am. Like, who’s Megan Porta as a brand? And like, it just has given me so much clarity that I never had before.

[00:30:26]   

And my business is almost 15 years old, Shruthi. So it’s been enlightening. And even, like you said, your voice, like, I. Yeah, I can pinpoint posts and even paragraphs where it’s like, okay, that’s her. Who Megan is. And just pulling those out and just remembering. Yeah, like you said, like, remembering who you are.

[00:30:49]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah, yeah. And I think that applies to, like I mean what I was saying is actually like applicable to not just AI, but like your business on the whole. But the one other thing I will say is AI also sometimes springs a trap of getting you to focus on too many things at once.

[00:31:08]   

Because you can do anything with AI, it’s never going to tell you hey, hey, like hit the brakes like you. And so I would really like. I work on a very strict one project per quarter basis. So every quarter I take on one thing.

[00:31:25]  Megan Porta 

I love that.

[00:31:26]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

And, and I focus on. And you know, your, your baseload is always going to be stable. You’re always going to need to like publish or update content. You probably need to send out some emails, do something on social, you know what I mean? Like there is that. But then last quarter I was like focused all on email.

[00:31:42]   

I cleaned up my email list. I like really re segmented, I like clarified their experience. And then I said, okay, this quarter I’m gonna focus on Instagram.

[00:31:50]  Megan Porta 

Clearly that’s obvious.

[00:31:55]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

And I think it really allows you to kind of dial each part of that in and I think really engaging at that deeper level will also tell you when something is not going well. It’ll help you identify very quickly that there is drift happening within AI and course correct quicker than a slow kind of like, you know, because if you think about it right, like each chat is probably only 1% or 5% off but if you spend 10 hours on it, 5% adds up.

[00:32:27]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, absolutely.

[00:32:28]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

5% that you don’t have to give, you know, you. Or you’d rather be doing something else with that 5% of your time.

[00:32:34]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is, it’s a lot to think about. I’m going to go in and clean up my. Clean up my instructions so that my AI tool isn’t so confused by me. Well, thank you. This was so helpful in our landscape today. I think this is going to really resonate with a lot of people. So is there anything else before we say goodbye, Shruthi?

[00:33:00]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

No, people are. I mean if anybody wants to talk about this, you can always reach me. And I actually recently started a Substack talking about this too. It’s called Mise en Claude.

[00:33:13]  Megan Porta 

I love it. I love it.

[00:33:17]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

So happy to share that. I just write about things that I’m finding as I, as I go along. It’s a free. I’m just writing stuff.

[00:33:26]  Megan Porta 

I’m going to follow that totally. That sounds super helpful. And you have been on the show before, right? When. What’s that? Was this was years ago. I can’t remember what we even talked about.

[00:33:39]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

I want to say like 2020, because I remember.

[00:33:41]  Megan Porta 

Oh, my gosh.

[00:33:42]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah. I had hit 100,000 sessions. It was like something like big. And I was like, oh, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

[00:33:53]  Megan Porta 

Amazing. So your show notes can be found at eatblogtalk.com/urbanfarmie2 since you’ve been on before, go check out Shruthi’s previous episode. Though, I don’t know, it might be fun and interesting, but yeah, thank you for joining us. And I have to mention your Instagram account. Definitely go check out Shruthi on Instagram. And you’re just Urban Farmie there.


[00:34:15]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Correct.

[00:34:16]  Megan Porta 

Frame. M I E.

[00:34:19]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Because I work in that culture.

[00:34:22]  Megan Porta 

Absolutely love it. And congrats again on leaving your job and doing this full time. That’s so incredible. I love when people reach that point. It’s such a thing to celebrate.

[00:34:33]  Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju 

Yeah, no, I am. I am excited.

[00:34:36]  Megan Porta 

Yeah, I can tell. I can see it in your face. Well, thanks, Shruthi again and thank you food bloggers for listening. I will see you next time. 

[00:34:36]  Outro

Thank you so much for listening to Eat Blog Talk. The best way to support this show is to share it with another blogger or friend who could use encouragement today. Let’s share the love. I will see you in the next episode.